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The Open Funder Registry

The Open Funder Registry provides a common taxonomy of over 13,000 international funding organization names together with unique IDs for each. Publishers should use the Registry to normalize collection of funding bodies from authors at the time of submission, and to deposit funding agency names (funder_name) and IDs (funder_identifier) with Crossref. For more information on depositing funding data see the main funding data help page.

The list is available to download as an RDF file from GitHub, and is freely available under a CC0 license waiver.

To the extent possible under law, Crossref has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to the Open Funder Registry.

If you are accessing the Registry via its DOI you can use the following method:

The Funder Registry download links provided by Crossref allow HEAD requests; HTTP requests that will only return HTTP headers, rather than the whole registry file. HEAD requests can be used to retrieve a "last modified" date for the registry files. Below is an example of making a HEAD request to the Registry DOI. First a request is made to get the redirect location of the DOI, and then a second HEAD request is made to determine the last modified time of the registry file:

Here we can see that the registry was "Last-Modified" on 1st July 2013. This can be checked against a timestamp we may have previously recorded when downloading the registry. If the timestamp is more recent than the one we have recorded, or this is the first time we are downloading the registry, we would go ahead and make a normal GET request to download the registry file: